It wasn’t long before she felt her brain ‘growing rusty’, and in April 1917 she returned to Oxford to work as apprentice to the publisher and bookseller Basil Blackwell, an early supporter of her writing. (One of her earliest poems had appeared in his anthology Oxford Poetry in December 1915, alongside ‘Goblin Feet’, the first published poem by J. R. R. Tolkien; in December 1916, Blackwell had published her debut collection, the appropriately titled Op. I.) ‘There is no future in teaching,’ she insisted to her father, ‘and I think that I might really make something of publishing.’ She enjoyed the work, which combined her literary acumen with a pleasing emphasis on practicality. But in the summer of 1919, keen once more for ‘a thorough change’, she left Blackwell’s for Normandy.
Sayers had an ulterior motive for accepting a secretarial position at L’École des Roches in the French village of Verneuil, a school for boys founded on the model of the English public school system. It would involve working alongside Eric Whelpton, an Oxford friend with whom Sayers had fallen in love. Unfortunately, Whelpton (so he later claimed) had failed to notice Sayers’s attraction to him – which was obvious to their friends – due to post-traumatic stress from his time in the army, as well as his consuming dalliance with ‘an intelligent semi-Austrian countess’. Before she left, Sayers’s father summoned Whelpton to dinner at the family home, where Whelpton – awkwardly attired in a formal suit – later remembered assuring him that ‘my affections were already engaged, that I had no romantic intentions whatsoever with regard to Dorothy, that she would be lodged in a different house and I should see very little of her outside office hours’.
Regrettably for Sayers, his promises proved true. In July 1920, Whelpton suddenly declared his intention to move to Florence with a divorced woman whom he had met at the theatre and tracked down via an advertisement in the personal column of The Times. ‘The whole thing would be most heroic and pathetic if one didn’t see the comic side of it,’ wrote Sayers in wry acceptance of the situation. Whelpton suggested she stay on at the school and take over his job, but she decided against it, though she had enjoyed the casual atmosphere, the company of the lively boys and the good food: she wanted new excitements, and a home of her own, where she could devote herself to work that truly interested her. ‘I really want to get to London if possible,’ she told her parents. In August, on the back of some paper headed with the address of Whelpton’s new employer, she jotted down her hopes for the future. ‘Certainly no more teaching – I have had my share of that … Settling down is as unsettling as being unsettled – however I suppose I shall get used to it.’ At the end of September 1920, she arrived in London, with no job and nowhere to live. The news that the University of Oxford had, on 11 May, passed a statute allowing women to take degrees (except in theology) under the same conditions as men was a brief triumph in a period of gloom. As she stood in the Sheldonian in her new cap and gown, Dorothy L. Sayers faced an uncertain future.
*
London, in the years immediately after the First World War, was a dismal place, the streets haunted by an air of gloom and decay. ‘Our generation is daily scourged by the bloody war,’ noted Virginia Woolf, who grew used to passing veterans with ‘stiff legs, single legs, sticks shod with rubber, and empty sleeves’ on the streets. ‘People in a century will say how terrible it all was.’ It was widely accepted that the cohort ‘lost’ in the war was, as J. B. Priestley put it, ‘a great generation, marvellous in its promise’, and the country fell into a prolonged national display of mourning. In November 1920, the corpse of an unknown soldier was brought from France by boat in a coffin carved from Hampton Court oak and given a state burial in Westminster Abbey, attended by King George V. But behind the pomp of Armistice Day lingered the shadow of everyday, unspoken suffering. While the peace agreement signed in Paris in 1919 had professed to herald a new era for international relations, founded on the harmonious cooperation of countries under the League of Nations, its announcement of harsh reparation terms for Germany led many to suspect that the courage and idealism of the generation who had fought to end war had been betrayed. In 1922 the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell-Shock’ submitted a bland and unsympathetic report to parliament, equating the condition to cowardice and suggesting that only ‘a real effort of will’ was required to surmount it; many seriously ill men were diagnosed insane and left to fester in their trauma. Within a few months of the Armistice, thousands of ex-soldiers were sleeping destitute in Hyde Park. During Sayers’s first month in London, major demonstrations against unemployment were held in the city, where men charged Whitehall and were beaten back by police.
These events are largely absent from her letters home at the time, as she concentrated on her own predicaments, though they came to shape her later fiction. But in 1920, London signified possibility to Sayers. She was introduced to a film producer who told her that screenwriting was ‘a frightfully paying business if one had the knack’ and encouraged her to try drafting a scenario from Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s 1908 novel Blood and Sand, a romantic drama about a Spanish matador. Sayers poured research from the book and from contemporary cinema into her proposal for a silent film, written in turquoise ink on the back of adverts for L’École des Roches. The commission came to nothing – it soon became clear that the producer had neglected to confirm that the rights were actually available – but this setback was a thrill in its own way: it signalled that she was a professional, learning to take the rough with the smooth, and allowed her to hope that next time might be different. ‘There seem to be plenty of opportunities going about, anyhow,’ she wrote to her parents; her father enclosed a five-pound note with his sympathetic reply. ‘More than ever, though, I realise the paramount necessity of always being on the spot – I feel as if I hardly dared leave London for a second.’
Her determination to pursue the London literary life only renewed, Sayers’s thoughts now turned to accommodation. A plan to share a flat with her friend Muriel Jaeger (‘I think we could manage without quarrelling, on a strictly independent basis of course’) fell through, but on 26 October she told her parents she had ‘fixed up to take a very nice unfurnished room at the top of a sort of Ladies’ Club in St George’s Square, S. W.’, where she slept on ‘an excellent camp bed, slightly damaged’. But this turned out to be a short-lived home: the landlady having proved impossible (‘her rents are too high, and she won’t try to be amiable’), Sayers gave notice on 3 December and began, with some urgency, to seek alternative digs. A friend of Muriel’s alerted her to a ‘rather beautiful room’ she had considered for herself. On 7 December 1920, Sayers wrote to her parents in improved spirits: ‘Dearest People – The die is cast and I am departing on Thursday to 44 Mecklenburgh Square W.C.1, where I think I shall be much happier.’ She hired a local greengrocer to move her belongings, and was relieved to be free of the Pimlico landlady’s ‘diabolical’ temper. She hoped that Mecklenburgh Square – and, by extension, her life there – would prove ‘very different, and a success’:
It is the room Mrs McKillop saw and liked so much – a lovely Georgian room, with three great windows – alas! would that I could afford curtains to them! – perhaps I shall in time – and a balcony looking onto the square. There is an open fireplace, and the last tenant has thoughtfully left some coal behind, which I can take over at a valuation – and there is a gas-ring. The only drawback is, no electric light, but I shall get a little oil-lamp, which will look very nice. It is a beautiful big room, far larger than the one I am in now, and costs less money. The landlady is a curious, eccentric-looking person with short hair – the opposite of Miss Latch in every way – and thoroughly understands that one wants to be quite independent. That is really all I want – to be left alone, and I can’t think why people won’t leave me!
It was the very room which H. D. had left in 1918. (The night-blue curtains, no longer required for blackout purposes, had evidently disappeared.) Sayers’s landlady, Elinor James, was the same woman H. D. described in Bid
Me to Live as a ‘valiant militant suffragette’ always swathed in Venetian shawls and clutching a glass of Chianti, who filled her house with young bohemians. As Cournos put it in Miranda Masters, ‘She would rather see her rooms empty than fill them with bourgeois undesirables. She looked askance on married couples and gave preference to couples unmarried, living in the bliss of informal union.’ This eccentric environment suited Sayers well. ‘I am installed in my new quarters,’ she told her parents on 9 December, ‘and think I shall like them very much, though I and my little belongings look rather lost in this vast space at present.’ She asked Basil Blackwell to send her a print of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (‘to adorn my chimney-piece’) and told her parents, ‘I do very much hope I shall be able to stay here. I’m going to try hard.’
Instantly, Sayers felt at home in Mecklenburgh Square – far more so than H. D. had ever felt in the same room. The house, she wrote, was (as before) ‘full from attic to basement’, and was presided over by Miss James, no longer the stern host of dreaded Zeppelin teas: ‘very nice – one never sees her. Only occasionally, just as one is hurrying away to an appointment, she wanders out and engages one in a discussion of art, literature or domestic economy.’ H. D. had felt oppressed by Miss James, had sensed her presence as a silent judgement on her domestic upheaval. Sayers, by contrast, saw the landlady as an amusing neighbour and potential confidante, and enjoyed rubbing along efficiently with transient neighbours: after boarding school and college the lack of privacy, to her, felt companionable rather than uncomfortable. Both women projected on to the house their own feelings about their life there. To H. D., more insecure and anxious by nature, the boarding house had signified the dissolution of all domestic structures, mirroring the collapse of her marriage; to Sayers, happily unmarried, it meant independence.
Another ‘very nice’ woman did the cleaning and washing-up ‘for a moderate stipend’, leaving Sayers to enjoy her new-found freedom. She embraced domesticity, beginning to make jumpers from old remnants, and planning ahead to ‘delightful underclothing, all over little purple parrots!’ Living alone involved learning some lessons which had evaded her at Somerville and L’École des Roches, where meals were provided in halls. ‘I have discovered,’ she wrote cheerfully, ‘that the one really vital necessity for living in unfurnished digs is a frying-pan. I bought one the other day, and have just been illustrating my favourite theory – the superiority of the trained mind, no matter what its training has been. Although I can’t remember ever having had a frying-pan in my hand before, there was nothing wrong with the eggs I had this evening – or at least, if there was, it was only a sort of urban flavour which wasn’t my fault. Of course, if it was ever possible to send new-laid rustic eggs by post – but there!’ Her parents were sympathetic to their daughter’s travails – and on 22 January 1921, Sayers wrote to thank her mother for ‘the lovely eggs, which are a great joy’. Nonetheless, her new home’s proximity to the restaurants of Fitzrovia and the West End offered temptations hard to resist. ‘Don’t ever think I’m not feeding myself well,’ she wrote. ‘Food is my most sinful extravagance. I am just going out to get a huge dinner in Soho for two shillings and threepence (beer extra)!’
*
When later asked to describe her aspirations upon leaving university, Sayers replied that she must have ‘felt that I was cut out by nature to be the world’s greatest something-or-other, but that all I was likely to achieve was an educational job of some kind’. Teaching – considered a respectable extension of women’s nurturing role – was where 80 per cent of women graduates from Oxford and Cambridge found employment until they married, which legally ended their contracts until the marriage bar was lifted in 1935. Moving to Bloomsbury, where literary women were congregating in the cheap boarding houses around the British Museum, was a brave announcement that Sayers was serious about a different way of life. ‘It’s immoral,’ she wrote sternly to Muriel Jaeger, ‘to take up a job solely for the amount of time one can spend away from it, which is what most of us do with teaching.’ But she was acutely aware that an alternative path would be precarious and came with no guarantee of success. With reluctance, but to prove to her parents that she was pragmatic as well as ambitious, Sayers accepted a temporary teaching post at Clapham High School for the first months of 1921. She was remembered by a former pupil as ‘looking rather ungainly, pale-faced, hair crimped back into a bun, pince-nez dangling round her neck, wearing a shapeless black dress down which it looked as if she had dropped half her breakfast’. Cultivating an air of eccentricity betraying the fact that she didn’t really want to be there, she would teach supine, lying on a bench, and once employed a sword with which to gesticulate at the blackboard.
This was not her only employment: she was pleased to find, through a contact of her father’s, ‘a little gold-mine’ in providing French translations for ‘some unspecified Polish organisation’, which paid a shilling a page and enabled her to buy a bedcover ‘of a sort of futurist pattern in orange, black and violet’. The agency was erratic in paying on time, but when she mentioned this to Miss James, the landlady (perhaps sympathetic to Sayers’s anguished desire both to pay her own way and to pursue her writing seriously) offered to lend her money and delay her rent payments. ‘She really seems a model sort of landlady,’ Sayers wrote. And the money earned by this hack work allowed her to continue with her own poetry. A translation from the Old French of the twelfth-century Tristan by Thomas of Britain – whom she admired ‘as a master of the psychological novel, and as a lyric poet’ – had been published in the Modern Languages journal in June and August 1920, and she was delighted to report on 14 December that her poem ‘Obsequies for Music’ had been accepted by J. C. Squire, editor of the London Mercury, ‘a particularly swell sort of monthly, run by tip-top people’. The following week, she apologised to her father and aunt for misleading them into supposing she was in actual debt; they had both sent large cheques, alarmed by her cheerful claims of destitution. In fact, Sayers was proud of her Bloomsbury independence, contrasting her tenacity favourably with that of Muriel Jaeger, who had quit a job as a subeditor at the feminist weekly Time and Tide to return to her family home. ‘She really isn’t as good at roughing it in rooms as I am. She really likes comfort and needs it, of course, being much more delicate than I am – but she doesn’t know in the least how to make herself comfortable.’
Life in London soon revolved around work. ‘I don’t seem to have any news,’ she wrote to her parents. ‘I read and write at the British Museum and have my meals and go to bed!’ She went to see Marlowe’s Edward II at Birkbeck College, ‘and came to the conclusion that Elizabethan tragedy was rather over-rated’; she visited the National Gallery, and attended ‘a meeting of “Faithists” – an obscure sect at Balham, where the minister is “controlled” by a spirit – THE Spirit, he says – and hurls fearful inspired speeches at one in the dark’. But Sayers’s greatest pleasure during the year – which would inspire a significant new project – was the season of Grand Guignol plays at the Little Theatre on John Adam Street, a seedy alleyway just off the Strand. The lease of the tiny theatre, its entrance announced by revolving red lights, had been taken over by the director Jose Levy in homage to the Theatre du Grand Guignol in the Montmartre district of Paris, where so many visitors fainted during performances that a resident doctor was employed. The productions were known for their heady combination of the violent and the erotic, and revelled in breaking taboos and disquieting audiences with a blend of titillation and horror. The first London season opened in September 1920 and closed in June 1922 after numerous run-ins with the censors, who baulked at the nudity, adultery, poisonings, blood and occasional eye-gouging. One poster advertisement – featuring a cartoon of a terrified audience in states of collapse or rushing away from the theatre – was deemed so frightening that it was banned on the London Underground.
The plays courted plenty of controversy, but their high-calibre writers (Noël Coward was among Levy’s roster) an
d celebrity actors (such as Sybil Thorndike, whose bloodcurdling scream was notorious) enticed devoted audiences, including, on at least one occasion, Virginia Woolf. Sayers adored the experience and attended several times with various friends – ‘I hear that this new series of plays surpasses everything else in grisliness,’ she wrote. This initiation into the macabre infiltrated her latest projects, revealed on 22 January 1921 in a letter to her mother. ‘I’m in a great hurry, because I’m doing the Clapham work and the Poles, and of course have chosen this moment to be visited with ideas for a detective story and a Grand Guignol play, neither of which will certainly ever get written … My detective story begins brightly with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now, why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he’s a very cool and cunning fellow. The Grand Guignol play ends with a poisoned kiss!’
*
In Sayers’s 1934 novel The Nine Tailors, a young character named Hilary Thorpe is asked whether she plans to become a poet. ‘Well, perhaps,’ she replies. ‘But I don’t suppose that pays very well. I’ll write novels. Best-sellers. The sort that everybody goes potty over.’ Now that Sayers was living independently, paying her own rent and bills, she was happy to adjust her literary aspirations to the commercial realities of attempting to live by her pen. Sayers’s early poetry was expressive and lyrical, her subject matter gesturing to the melancholic but never to the morbid. But the prose with which she had begun to experiment while in France, and then in Mecklenburgh Square, displayed a distinct relish for the gruesome. In a film script titled Bonds of Egypt, a jealous professor chloroforms a love rival and substitutes him, barely breathing, for an ancient Egyptian mummy on show in a regional museum; the unfortunate man’s plight is discovered at the last minute when the caretaker notices ice crystals, produced by his desperate gasps, on the inside of the glass case. Another early story, ‘The Priest’s Chamber’, introduces a tormented medieval priest who has an affair with the wife of a baron, and is so terrified of public disgrace that he crucifies her in his chamber, the ghastly cross lit by six flaring altar candles. The second part of the story, dated 1919, sees a young woman, visiting a friend in her castle, discover that the house remains haunted by vestiges of the long-ago crime.
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